With just over three weeks to go until the first wave of countries will begin selling the new Apple Watch (and less than two weeks until curious customers can try one on), Apple has sent out a reminder to developers that they can now submit apps based on WatchKit to the App Store in order to be ready for the public debut on April 24. The email to developers included a link to a submission tutorial.

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Apple has announced that it will reveal the results of its fiscal second quarter of the year (which ends today) on Monday, April 27 at 2PM Pacific, or 5PM Eastern. The company generally offers a press release shortly after US markets close at 4PM Eastern. Analysts are expecting sales to be up from the year-ago quarter, but down around 25 percent from the holiday quarter.

A few years ago Griffin launched the original Twenty, a small digital amp that used an AirPort Express to turn any set of passive speakers into a wireless system for streaming music. Unfortunately for Griffin, shortly after the launch of the Twenty, Apple updated the design of the AirPort Express, which instantly antiquated the digital amp. Now, thanks to advancements in Bluetooth technology, Griffin no longer needs to lean on Apple's AirPlay technology for streaming, and is back with a new and improved version of the Twenty Digital Amp. We have spent some time with the updated digital amp -- see what we thought about it in our full review.

Today Quark Software announced that QuarkXPress 2015, the next major version of Quark's design and layout tool for print and digital publishing, will be available on April 28. The company claims that QuarkXPress 2015 will deliver increased performance with a new 64-bit architecture, efficient print and digital production, and many of the most user-requested features. The new version of QuarkXPress will continue to be sold as a perpetual license.

Welcome to Daily Deals, the regular post where we scour the Internet for discounts, offers, and deals for our discerning MacNN and Electronista readers. Today, we recap the still-active deals from yesterday, and the new additions to the list this time includes a 960GB SSD for under $300, discounted Mac minis and MacBooks at Micro Center, and a Fujifilm FinePix bundle at Best Buy.

Most of the time, the secret to getting things done is getting on with them, and doing things. The Pomodoro technique is a trick to get yourself going, and keep yourself going, which has been around since the 1980s and is perfect for being turned into an app. Consequently there are many such apps, but the newly-updated Pomodoro Time Pro is a solid, capable and versatile one.

Baseball. Even if you're not a fan if the game, you've heard of it. The greats of the game, such as Babe Ruth, Hank Aaron, and Lou Gehrig, are some of the most revered professional athletes in the history of sports. Even though there are international baseball leagues today, the sport of baseball will always be inextricably linked with the US. Baseball is kind of a big thing. Out Of the Park 16, from Out of the Park Developments, is leading the stats-gamer's pack.

On Tuesdays and Fridays MacNN takes a few minutes to round up important goings-on in the Mac and iOS gaming world. Today, we're looking the upcoming release of a Star Wars: Rebels table for Zen Pinball 2, the arrival of a Final Fantasy MMORPG on OS X, and the release of RBI Baseball 15 on both of Cupertino's current operating systems.

The US International Trade Commission has announced a formal investigation into a complaint filed by Ericsson -- along with a handful of court cases -- following a lawsuit by Apple over what the iPhone maker says is a dispute about a fair rate for some standards-essential and LTE patents. The battle began earlier this year, when Apple complained to a court about "excessive" rates Ericsson wanted to charge for previously-licensed LTE technology.

WhatsApp is rolling out its voice calling function to all mobile users, starting with Android. Slowly introduced to users in early February, the latest update to WhatsApp in the Google Play app store is apparently enabled for the service, which lets users call other contacts instead of sending messages, though it appears users are still having to wait for their account to be enabled.

Yesterday in the MacNN forums, Moderator "Thorzdad" reported some strange behavior with the way that Safari was displaying webpages, noting that it doesn't look like pages are being saved in the cache properly. Late last week forum-members tried to assist "The Final Dakar" with figuring out why his remote App doesn't see his Apple TV.

At Apple's online store today, chose from a wide selection of refurbished Macs. The refurbished 11.6-inch MacBook Air with a 1.3GHz Intel dual-core i5 processor, 4GB of RAM and 256GB of flash storage, now $809 after a $240 discount. A $270 price cut is offered on the refurbished 13.3-inch MacBook Pro with a 2.5GHz Intel dual-core i5 processor, 4GB of RAM, 500GB hard drive and 8x SuperDrive.

You can't make a camera be better than it is, but you can have a good go: Hydra 1.0.2 for iOS aims to create high-resolution images by taking and combining many, many shots in quick succession. The results depend gigantically on what you're photographing, and how steady your hand is, but it can work well and even when it fails, it can be rather pretty.

Hello -- my name is Mike. I've been the Managing Editor at MacNN and Electronista for a few months. MacNN has been a great resource for nearly two decades, but we haven't done much to stand out from the crowd since the days when Mac and Apple news on the web was hard to come by. Maybe you've already seen some things change around here, so read on a bit, and see what we have planned for our future.

Photography apps are our bread and butter here, and we've taken a look at quite a few of them -- so we consider ourselves experts in some regard. One of our favorite types of apps are analog photography filter apps, especially those that offer unique effects. We took a look at Lo-Mob, an app that promises to help lend an authentic feel of experimental analog photography to your digital pictures.

We're now at episode eight of The MacNN Podcast, which this week welcomes our new Apple Gaming column, as well as reminding listeners about our weekly game news roundup. We also discuss the book Becoming Steve Jobs, and Tim Cook's latest honor from the business world. More confusion about Windows 10 pricing outside China has come to light, and tech companies are asking for changes in the Patriot Act.

Monday, March 30, 2015

Taking a screen shot on your iPhone is easy enough to do, right? Well, provided it's not a long document, web page, text conversation or Facebook thread, that is. But what if you do need to take a screenshot of a whole web page, or conversation in Messages? You can always take multiple screenshots and meticulously organize them, or you can just try out Tailor, an app that creates continuous screenshots for you.

Music streaming service Tidal has relaunched as an artist-owned company. At a star-studded launch event streamed live, the musical artists owning part of the service gathered together for the announcement, with the overall message offered being Tidal's push to benefit musical artists more than its competitors, such as Spotify and its allegedly low royalty payments.

On Monday, Apple issued a sixth beta of OS X Yosemite 10.10.3 to developers, and an identical third beta to registered public testers. The new build, numbered 14D127a, is said to be mostly a security, compatibility, and stability bugfix release, though the company has added a request that testers focus on screen-sharing features as well as Hebrew and Arabic localizations, on top of the ongoing focus on Wi-Fi "captive portal" networks (such as hotels or coffeeshops).

Apple did a great thing in bringing Time Machine to the rest of us: it made backups a more familiar idea, and it made them far easier to understand as well. Something that is easy and familiar is something that you're going to do, and Apple was right that we really, really needed to back up our work. Now Apple is more focused on cloud storage than it is hard drives -- and there are several cloud backup services -- but the humble hard disk has a lot of advantages. It also has SuperDuper 2.7.5, which is a capable, albeit slightly technical, application for copying your data, and for creating a hard drive that you can run your Mac from in emergencies.

Welcome to Daily Deals, the weekday post when the staff of MacNN and Electronista take a moment to search retailers for offers, discounts, and other items for you, our beloved readers. Today, we wipe the slate clean of older deals, with the new deals including hefty discounts on Sony noise-cancelling headphones, a $65 Canon multifunction laser printer, and a sub-$400 30-inch display.

As reported previously, Apple has now expanded its "reuse and recycling" program in the US and Europe to include now taking selected models of non-iPhone smartphones as trade-in towards a new iPhone. The program is now operating throughout the US, Canada, the UK, France, and Italy, and may be operating in other countries as well. Only specific recent models are eligible, but customers can being the process either online or in person at an Apple Store.

It's in a child's nature to be interested about the world around them, and as parents and teachers, there's a certain obligation you have to encourage that. Starting from age two, kids just seem to become more and more inquisitive, and while the "why?" phase is never fun, watching a child develop a genuine interest in the way the world works is one of the best things a parent gets to witness. Finding games that can help foster those interests isn't always easy, but we think that Crazy Gears is a good place to start.

The Universal movie about Steve Jobs is continuing its principle photography, and over the weekend filmed scenes revolving around the May 6, 1998 original iMac unveiling. One of three key scenes in the film that cover product launches, the film used extras to show attendees of the keynote from 1998 holding signs and banners welcoming back Steve Jobs, and others to film interior scenes of the original presentation.

We're quite familiar with Toca Boca apps over here, and we've loved every app we've gotten our hands on. Between the fantastic free-play atmosphere, the well designed graphics, and the fun game play mechanics, we've come to expect greatness from them. When we found out about Toca Builders, we knew we had to check it out immediately.

URLs are ugly – and they are also very daunting if you're new to the web. So long as they're up there in the browser and you just got to the site by clicking a heading in Google, nobody cares. Yet when you send them to someone, that's when you can put them off or you can make their life easier. It's also where you can demonstrate that you know your stuff. There is one important caveat to this but otherwise this Pointers will show you how to make emails with links that simply look better than sending someone a five-foot-long string of dots and slashes. The specific steps in this tutorial are all for Mail in OS X Yosemite.